1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information terminal such as a mobile phone, PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), personal computer, or the like and, more particularly, to an information terminal with a function of playing back contents.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, many of information terminals such as a mobile phone, PDA, and the like have a content playback function in addition to a mail communication function, Internet access function, voice communication function, and the like. The content playback function downloads a desired content from a content delivery server using the communication function of the information terminal itself or loads a content from an external storage medium such as a memory card or the like or another information terminal such as a personal computer or the like, and stores the content in an internal memory or an attached external memory. The stored content is played back in response to a user's playback operation. As the types of contents, for example, music contents, video contents, and multimedia contents including audio, video, and text data are available.
Some contents are given copyright information that specifies the expiration dates, playback counts, and the like. When a content of such type is to be played back, a confirmation message indicating that the content is copyrighted is displayed on a display prior to playback. In this state, when the user performs a confirmation operation for the copyright, it is checked if the playback conditions are met. If the playback conditions are met, the content playback starts. If the content file is broken or if the file format is not compatible to the terminal and the content cannot be played back, a warning message that advices accordingly is displayed prior to playback. This technique is described in, e.g., Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2003-169377.
However, every time the confirmation message or warning message is displayed upon playing back the content, the user must perform the confirmation operation using an input key of the terminal, and then must perform an operation for selecting another content that can be played back. For this reason, such operations are troublesome, and impose a heavy load on the user.
Especially, when a music content is to be played back by a portable terminal, the terminal is put in a bag or pocket, and an earphone is used. For this reason, in order to perform the confirmation operation, the user must take out the terminal from the bag or pocket or must use a remote controller attached to the earphone. The operation at that time is especially troublesome for the user. Even when the terminal is not put in the bag or pocket, if the terminal is in a state wherein acceptance of a key input operation is constrained like a state wherein the housing of a flip type terminal is closed, the operability for the confirmation operation unavoidably drops.